Process Choreographies

Abstract

Process choreographies are addressed in Chapter 5. After motivating the need for process interactions and process choreographies as means to specify these interactions, development phases during choreography design are introduced. The design and implementation of process choreographies is presented, introducing consistency notions that guide the correct implementation of process choreographies. After introducing service interaction patterns and Let’s Dance as concrete notations for specifying choreographies, the respective diagram types provided by the BPMN are addressed. In particular, conversation diagrams and process choreography diagrams of the BPMN are presented and illustrated by a rich set of examples.

Bibliographical Notes

Business process choreographies were introduced as a mechanism to investigate business-to-business collaborations. In this context, domain standards were established that not only specify the message communication between the parties involved in a business-to-business interaction, but also the content of the messages. Domain standards of this kind are RosettaNet for supply chain management, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transfer in the financial sector, and Health Level Seven in health care. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards puts forward the ebXML standard for business collaboration in Dubray et al. (2006).

More recently, service interaction patterns have been introduced in Barros et al. (2005), and the language Let’s Dance was introduced in Zaha et al. (2006a). Interaction BPMN was proposed by Decker and Barros (2007). Business process choreographies are also investigated in Decker (2009) and Decker and Weske (2011). The execution semantics of service choreographies is reported in Decker et al. (2006). A unifying framework for compatibility and consistency in business-to-business process integration is introduced in Decker and Weske (2007).

The relationship between a global public process choreography and the realizations of the individual private orchestrations are investigated in van der Aalst and Weske (2001), based on work on process inheritance as introduced in Basten and van der Aalst (2001). The equivalence of process models, using their observable behaviour, is studied in van der Aalst et al. (2006). The relationship between compatibility notions in process choreographies and consistency of process implementations with regard to behavioural interfaces is studied in Decker and Weske (2007).

The operating guidelines approach is related to process choreographies; however, rather than our checking interconnected interface processes, a behavioural interface can be used to generate an operating guideline, which characterizes the valid interaction behaviours; operating guidelines are introduced in Massuthe et al. (2005).

This text book can only introduce a limited set of choreography modelling capabilities of the BPMN. For a complete presentation, there is no substitute for the standards document Object Management Group (2011).